https://www.reddit.com/r/aspergirls/comments/th9hku/dsm5tr_n...

The only positive thing said about autism in that entire gigantic write-up is "Special interests may be a source of pleasure and motivation and provide avenues for education and employment later in life"

Why would doctors treat autism as being anything but negative with no positive when Autism is literally defined in that way? Of course, people since Leo Kanner and Hans Aspergers noted Autistics having extraordinary abilities, and people are vaguely aware of this, but doctors hold autistics in worse contempt than the general population mostly because you can't bill insurance to treat a "difference" or get a study grant to research a "difference". So the system they're in forces them to treat autistics as contemptible and even in need of curing. Besides that, psychiatry is after all the study of mental illness and disorders, not of mental differences, so there's a bias just from training.

Legal, UN definition, trying to cure a mental disorder is not eugenics. It is logically the same idea as eugenics though, the UN just didn't outlaw this idea since the mentally disordered were considered sufficiently inferior. Autistics can also be banned from sperm banks.

There's nothing to be done really as a mere not neurotypical internet dweller. The inertia of the status quo is like a train and many people benefit from it. The only real choice you have is to call yourself something like "Not neurotypical" instead of "Autistic".

Autism on the other hand is a modern condition, but I don't think there's really much dispute there's SOMETHING there because you see things like savants who are just inexplicable.

However, the rate at which we're diagnosing people today is totally unprecedented. The DSM and ICD-11 are also more like medical dictionaries than rigorously scientific reflections of underlying biological reality. They describe what Autism and ADHD are, but the categorisation is largely based on convention, clinical convenience, and a desire to fit a certain nosology rather than actual science. I've been looking into the alternative frameworks like RDOC and HITOP.

Anyways we're diagnosing people a lot more often nowadays, increasing the patient population, but still acting like research done on a much smaller patient population still holes up. Adaptive Behaviour Analysis therapy for instance is still insured in the United States based on research from the 90s when the average autistic child was very different than an average 2024 autistic child (not to say there hasn't been more research since than), and generally I see money and entrenched laws and bureaucratic guidelines and incentives as creating a sort of system which has no evidence of helping anybody which coincidentally results in a lot more money changing hands and more people getting government money.

Anyways I think the current system we have where we pretend that it's useful to say that Elon Musk and some guy who smashes his head into the wall until it bleeds to self-stimulate have the same disability strains credulity.

In general Aspergers basically meant no verbal delays, where Autism meant verbal delay. Autism was also around longer as a diagnosis. In general, I think theres a reason they changed the name of Aspergers to Autism and not the other way around.

Autism and "severe autism" in particular need to be addressed using totally different words.

If it wasn't a scientific distinction, why are we still identifying autism subtypes?

I've stopped identifying as autistic despite having a dx because I was tired of the way it got me treated worse by the general public who presume I'm far more incompetent than I actually am and medical practitioners who do the same. Last time I sought help for a totally unrelated issue they asked if I had any prior dx and I was foolishly honest so I was subsequently referred to a day program for unemployed people with severe mental health issues. I'm full time employed so I couldn't even attend. This is the outcome of treating "autistics" as a monolith.

After the DSM-IV they decided to consolidate 3 different autism spectrum diagnosis's into one. They said this was scientific, but IMHO, this was done so everybody with Aspergers or PDD-NOS to be eligible for the higher funding levels those categorised as "Autistic" got. Which has done nothing but take away funding from severely disabled people while causing more mildly impaired people to receive inappropriate and condescending treatment, I am fucking eligible for a full time day program where a social worker will be paid to chaperone me because I'm just so fucking needy that's just what needs to be done. This change was great for the psychiatrists through, who simply received more money as a result of making this diagnostic change, nice conflict of interest there.

As a society, we decided having certain labels of disability entitled you to special legal rights and certain financial benefits. Where I live any autism diagnosis, no matter how severe or mild, gets you a flat amount of money, whereas other diagnosis's even if the condition is more severe than autism get nothing. What do you think parents, who can shop around from a variety of private psychiatrists, looking to access therapy for their child that autistic kids also get do? So you might get a kid with ADHD or Anxiety or some speech disorder, and not getting an autism DX, but getting treated like a moderately impaired autistic.

I honestly loathe, absolutely loathe the status quo of autism diagnosis and treatment and am happy for any change to be made that splits the diagnosis up because it creates at least a hope of "Severe autism" receiving higher funding levels than the rest, and "autism light" starting to get similar funding levels to other disabilities so there isn't a perverse incentive. I have not made an online comment on any website in 1 month but this inspired me.

Tesla is selling a very expensive conversation piece out of a sci-fi movie. There's nothing else really like it.

I’ve downright gotten philosophical about it. The way my and other people’s suffering is used as a prop in other people’s stories.

The way I see it, if some people get personal satisfaction and a good reputation from being the stars, and their stardom leads to them helping people, I shrug. If you’re in a desperate situation you use the resources you have in front of you, and even say whatever it takes for them to help you more. I just don’t trust their motivations as people who “help the disadvantaged” can have INSANE saviour complexes and hurt those around them so they can heal them. Because they don’t actually care about you - they care about saving and being seen saving.

You’re perceptive to have caught on to the game so quickly. It took me years.

It’s impressive technology but it’s far from seamless. There’s less colours, less resolution, worse depth perception, more latency, and worse nightvision than your actual eyes. The quest makes your head quite a bit larger and you’re more likely to hang your head into something. It is very far from seamless.

They have a long way to go. Audio pass through still isn’t good enough for me to trust it never mind video pass through.

For me to watch a video on a phone, tablet, laptop, or TV is easy. Turn on screen. Play video. With wedding photos, you can make them your phone screen background, you can printout photos and put them on your wall, they fit into your life.

With VR, I have to blind myself to my surroundings, I have to either not move around sitting perfectly still or clear out a bunch of space. What has become more popular in recent years is Podcasting and a huge reason why is because how nonintrusive it is, you can listen to a podcast doing the dishes or on your way to work. VR is the opposite of nonintrusive.

I feel the immersion of VR is what's holding it back, not why it will be successful. It's only when mixed reality takes off that I think we're going to see a big change.

1400 yes learning a trap line can improve your results, so if you subscribe to the Eric Rosen school of opening theory you can benefit from openings. I’ve just never thought it’s worth learning much about conventional openings until about 1600.

Being the best out of the opening will typically put you a “quarter pawn” ahead, maybe putting you ahead as white or equalizing as black. Then if you’re a novice you will immediately hang a knight and end up 2.75 pawns behind. Then your opponent will hang a bishop and you’ll be a quarter pawn ahead again.

The other problem with learning opening theory against novices is you will learn 30 moves a side of Ruy Lopez opening theory and your opponent won’t get 10 moves without leaving theory rendering your study moot.

There’s far more emphasis on memorizing openings at the grandmaster level because people are playing a tight enough game elsewhere for that slight advantage to really matter, and because of all the pre-game preperation where teams of grandmasters and chess engines will come up with novel moves to throw an opponent off balance while the star player memorizes the lines. To the point of grandmasters like Bobby Fischer complain it ruined the game and inventing variants like chess960. All super grandmasters have outlier memorization abilities.

Generally club players just need to rote memorize not too deeply and understand the broad sweeping ideas and key moves of the openings (when white does that, counter them with this). That should allow them to come up with reasonable moves on the fly which might be the best or third best moves. Memorizing fewer openings at first is probably better. At the more casual level memory is much less important.

It’s usually a part of tactics training as well although not as purely, the polgar sisters for instance were drilled on the same chess positions day in day out in a spaced repetition system. This is going away a bit because chess puzzle databases have so many unique positions that there’s less need for repetition.

You might be inverting cause and effect.

I'm not saying this would have been Assange's fate, I would expect things to play out more like the Manning case. Still if somebody makes themselves an extremely prominent enemy of US intelligence, regardless of if you're an islamic terrorist or a whistleblowing journalist, it's very reasonable to theorise that there might be a conspiracy against them.

Usually the problem with conspiracy theories and why they're so mad is they presume thousands of actors act in concert with no clear motive to do so and all can keep a secret. This is a conspiracy which didn't really need to be kept all that secret, with a pretty blatant unifying motive - taking down Assange meant stemming leaks both directly and by making an example of him.